The software will be a fictional Football Club organisation application; that is Football, the game where you kick the round ball with your feet, not whatever this soccer thing is, never seen someone playing a football game in their socks ;) That can be used to manage club members, teams, management staff, fixtures and whatever else comes up along the way.

The reason for doing this is to delve into some of the technologies that I have been meaning to learn for some time. After reading through documentation, articles, blog posts, tutorials and whatever text I could get my hands on, I am ready to start attempting to implement something. If anyone does find this series then be warned, it is more of a learning experience than a manual. Something that I say/do in the first post may later be ripped out and done in a different way later on. Also if you spot something that isn't right, let me know, that's what comments are there for.

So lets get going then. The first thing we need is a set of requirements. I am going to use a style that might be similar in style to BDD requirements, although I've never really done any BDD before.

Requirements gathering can be quite boring, so I'm going to tell a story.

I set off in search of some people with a vested interest in the software. The first person I meet is the club owner.

That's it, that is the only requirement he has, after that he gets on his phone and I leave quietly. Don't you just love requirements. Ok, lets try and get some more out of the people at the club. I will assume that they have agreed that a software solution will be created that has some sort of data storage ability. I'm certainly not going to go through this exercise and tell them to go and buy everyone their own leather bound diary!

I find the club secretary who is responsible for looking after the smooth running and organisation of the club.

Wandering around the club offices I find the treasurer, who is responsible for the finances of the club. Far too busy to talk I only get a few requirements.

Later on I manage to get a meeting with a few of the team managers associated with the club. Ok, so all I managed to do was catch up with a manager during half time at a game.

While I'm at the game, I decided to talk to some of the substitutes, they had some requirements too.

As I am thanking the players and setting off to get back to work, (doesn't everyone work on a Saturday evening?), one of the team's fanatics fans confronts me. "You making a website for this lot? Well I got things I want on it too!"

Oh well, might as well humour him.

After that I switched off and drew fluffy clouds all over my notes.

Overall I think that we have a good enough set of feature requests to get us going. As everyone in the club is too busy to talk to us now, we are going to have to work out priorities by ourselves. We have a week day to get something together to show the club owner. The intention of the software is to help organise the club, so the fan's website requirements can probably be put deep into the product backlog!

Now that you have some background to what I am trying to do, the next post will hopefully start getting into some technology.